The Commentariat -- July 6, 2012
** Prof. William Forbath in a New York Times op-ed: "... today's court challenges the White House, the Democrats and the liberal legal community to reassert a constitutional vision of a national government empowered 'to promote the general Welfare' and -- in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's terse formula -- 'to regulate the national economy in the interest of those who labor to sustain it.'"
This Comes as No Surprise. Brian Beutler of TPM: "... many of the states with high-profile conservative governors vowing to stand athwart the ACA's progress, by refusing to expand their Medicaid programs and erecting hurdles to establishing insurance marketplaces, would stand to gain the most from successful implementation of the law." CW: let's be clear here: these governors are white Republican men who don't want to help poor people, particularly poor people of color. ...
... Ed Kilgore of Washington Monthly: "... this is an ideological and even a moral issue to conservatives, who view dependence on any form of public assistance as eroding the 'moral fiber' of the poor (as Paul Ryan likes to put it), and as corrupting the country through empowerment of big government as a redistributor of wealth from virtuous taxpayers to parasites who will perpetually vote themselves more of other people's money." These governors' real goal is to end Medicaid altogether.
Two card-carrying conservatives -- Mickey Kaus (here) & Scott Galupo (here) argue that universal healthcare "is a social prerequisite for more freedom and market-driven flexibility." That's refreshing!
Tim Egan: "In March, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a special report of 'unprecedented extreme weather and climate events' to come. The events are here, though the skeptics now running the Republican Party deny the obvious, in large part because they are paid to deny the obvious. But for those who are already familiar with the new face of nature, no amount of posturing can wish away the fire this time."
Presidential Race
President Obama finally boasted about the Affordable Care Act in a campaign stop yesterday:
Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian: "Barack Obama has used a tour of the swing state of Ohio to renew his claim that his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, led the outsourcing of American jobs to India and China. The assertion is controversial and has been largely discredited by independent fact-checking groups. But Obama showed no sign of backing away from the claims on Thursday, telling an audience in Maumee, Ohio that Romney's executive experience was in 'companies that were pioneers of outsourcing'." ...
... CW: this is a good example of the press, not the politician, misleading the reader. I checked the transcript, and here's exactly what Obama said: "Governor Romney's experience has been in owning companies that were called 'pioneers' of outsourcing. That's not my phrase -- 'pioneers' of outsourcing." Obama is 100 percent truthful here: this is a phrase from a Washington Post investigative report, and Obama is careful to characterize the wording as someone else's -- in this case, a reputable newspaper's (and one that is definitely not in the tank for Obama). Here's the New York Times story, which covers the remark, covers Romney's response, but doesn't accuse the President of misleading.
Rich Miller & John Detrixhe of Bloomberg News: "Mitt Romney has suggested that President Barack Obama has done a worse job managing the economy than Jimmy Carter. Investors disagree. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index of stock prices has surged 70 percent under Obama, more than three times the 19 percent increase seen during President Carter's first 3-1/2 years in office starting in 1977. The corporate and government bond markets also have outperformed, with yields falling rather than rising. And the dollar has fared better...."
New York Times Editors: Mitt is full of shit. (Okay, not exactly their words, but their sentiment.) "Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote that the mandate is legal under the Congressional taxing power, which Republicans took a step further, saying the mandate must now be a tax. And not just a tax, but a huge, oppressive tax, one of the largest in history. It is, of course, no such thing. How many 'oppressive taxes' are entirely optional? Anyone who does the smart thing and gets health insurance won't have to pay it. It is, as Mr. Romney himself described it in 2006, a fee to promote 'personal responsibility' and prevent healthy people from freeloading." ...
... Michael Shear & Ashley Parker of the New York Times: "As the Massachusetts governor and then as a presidential candidate, Mr. Romney spent the next six years describing in a variety of different ways the possible punishments for ignoring the Massachusetts mandate: as 'free-rider surcharges,' 'tax penalties,' 'tax incentives' and sometimes just as 'penalties.' But regardless of the terms he used, his intentions were clear: Massachusetts residents who chose not to buy health insurance would see their state income taxes go up. Now ... Mr. Romney is asking voters to condemn his rival for a health insurance mandate that is nearly identical to the one he championed in Massachusetts." His newest claim asks "voters to ignore his own record.... Mr. Romney is ... criticizing the president's approach with the same language that he once happily applied to his own achievement."
Paul Krugman: "Did I mention that Herbert Hoover actually was a great businessman in the classic mold? ... If Bain got involved with your company, one way or another, the odds were pretty good that even if your job survived you ended up with lower pay and diminished benefits. In short, what was good for Bain Capital definitely wasn't good for America...."
Jonathan Chait of New York: "Conservatives say they want Romney to change his staff or alter his campaign tactics. But what they really want is a different candidate and a different electorate. They want to believe that the American people are hungering for detailed endorsements of Republican plans to cut entitlement spending and taxes for the rich and launch a philosophical assault on the welfare state. But that's not what the public wants and Romney knows it." Read the whole post. ...
... Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: Emperor Rupert has never cared for Prince Willard. And the emperor's disdain for shows up in the product of his media empire.
CW: So here Ann Romney says that the Obama campaign sent out a memo early on that said, "Kill Romney." Anything is possible in politics, but I don't believe a presidential campaign would put that sentence to paper. When photographers took pictures of the Romneys jet-skiing, commentators called it a "John Kerry windsurfing moment." But it wasn't. The Obama campaign is not going to run ads that appear to disparage Ann Romney. I am beginning to think that the Romney campaign is using Ann Romney as a very effective foil: she lies & provides cover for her husband:
... P.S. Surely there are wingers out there already spreading the story that Obama plans to assassinate Romney.
AND. Let's Debate Obama's Race! One of the first cinematic black presidents says, "America's first black president hasn't arisen yet. [Obama]'s not America's first black president -- he's America's first mixed-race president."
Local News
This post by Gregg Easterbrook of the Atlantic is several days old, but if you live in Maryland or parts of Washington, D.C. and are a Pepco customer you'll want to read it, so you can get pissed off about the multi-day power outage all over again. Besides, maybe you're just now getting back on line so no news is old news.
Answer to July 7 PhotoQuiz: Michael Bloomberg, President of the Slide Rule Club; he was also in the debating club, technical club, science club & the homeroom dues agent.
News Ledes
Orlando Sun Sentinel: "Murder defendant George Zimmerman calmly walked out of the Seminole County Jail today with the help of donations to his legal defense fund. Zimmerman posted the $1 million bond thanks in part to the $20,000 in donations raised since Thursday when Circuit Judge Kenneth Lester Jr. set the bond amount."
** AP: "U.S. employers added only 80,000 jobs in June, a third straight month of weak hiring that shows the economy is struggling three years after the recession ended. The Labor Department said Friday that the unemployment rate was unchanged at 8.2 percent."
Guardian: "Central banks around the world signalled their determination to stimulate the flagging global economy on Thursday yesterday, with the injection of £50bn of electronic money into the UK and interest rate cuts in the eurozone and China. The Bank of England warned that recovery was at risk without a boost to its programme of quantitative easing after a flurry of economic surveys showed the double-dip recession could stretch into the autumn."
Huffington Post: yesterday California called for an amendment to the U.S. constitution overturning Citizens United vs. FEC, "which ruled that government restriction of corporation or union spending on political campaigns violated the First Amendment right to free speech. California joins Hawaii, Vermont, Rhode Island, Maryland and New Mexico in calling for ... overturn[ing] the Supreme Court ruling."
New York Times: "Opponents of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria met [in Paris] on Friday with their international sponsors to intensify pressure for his removal, buoyed by word that Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass, a commander in the elite Republican Guard, and a member of the Damascus aristocracy, had defected and fled the country."
AP: "Former Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla was convicted and sentenced to 50 years Thursday for a systematic plan to steal babies from prisoners who were kidnapped, tortured and killed during the military junta's war on leftist dissenters three decades ago. Argentina's last dictator, Reynaldo Bignone, also was convicted and got 15 years."
New York Times: "French investigators' final report on the 2009 crash of an Air France jet that killed 228 people portrays a cockpit rapidly consumed by confusion and unable to decode a welter of alarms to determine which flight readings could be trusted, with the pilots' apparent reliance on a faulty display cementing the plane into its fatal stall."
AFP: "Equador's foreign minister has said that rape and sexual assault cases lodged in Sweden against Julian Assange are laughable, but no ruling has yet been made on the WikiLeaks founder's asylum application."
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Reader Comments (5)
Re the Atlantic post about the horrors of Pepco in Montgomery County, Md and D.C. Those of us who lived in the area know it well. The people who bought my house in McLean, VA (when I moved to Oregon), told me their entire street was without power for 4 days--except for them and the house directly across the street--which just "happens" to belong to the Deputy Director of the CIA. No inconveniences allowed. Never know when we might need to send out another drone! A great example of "Power begetting Power!"
On the UP side, I hear that David Brooks' multi-million dollar Queen Anne manse in classy Cleveland Park (D.C.) is still without power. HA! Hope everything in his frig is now as rotten as his prose. He can't buy his way out of this one--unless he has an expensive generator, which Cleveland Park (when I lived in the area) disallowed. Pepco rocks, she said bitchily and with ill-will.
There is always a limit. Even for the MSM, it is hard to keep your eyes closed forever. In the last few days there seems to be a bit of an awakening. Finally Mitt said something so 'dumb' (a quote from the WSJ) about the ACA tax that the flip may have actually caused a flop.
And the now that the evening news spends the first 10 min. of every broadcast watching the country burn, the words 'global warming' are actually mentioned.
So you can hide from the facts, but in these cases the perps keep coming at you.
The Atlantic story about Pepco may be days old, but it was news to me. Ouch! A rather damning story, especially this line: "Montgomery County, Maryland, is one of the nation's bluest and wealthiest counties; its perennially awful power service raises the question of whether liberals can make the trains run on time." We all know that the majority of Italians loved Mussolini because he always had the trains run on time––or so the story goes. So now we blame O'Malley, a liberal, for Pepco's inefficiency but jump the gun here and question all liberal's acumen at train running in general? Many moons ago when the electrical grid was being implemented someone must have said, "It would be better, wiser, and cheaper in the long run if we lay lines underground." From what I understand all new lines are done that way now. But back to the article by whats-his-name who sounds at his wit's end. Maybe he and David Brooks (thanks, Kate, for the image) are sharing a warm beer in a public park under a shady oak.
Re: Lisa's example yesterday of the Nannie mit kinder. I'd buy that if there was no one else on the beach, but since that wasn't in the scenario and since beaches usually have many bathers, the life-saving Nannie could fend off her charges to some nice lady with a large hat while she, the Nannie, rushes in and saves the drowning person who would be most grateful, maybe giving Nannie a large reward, allowing her to opt out of the kinder care just in case the parents were not happy with having their children pushed off in the care of the nice lady with the large hat.
And by gum, Ann is standing by her man even though her accusations are baseless. She better watch out–––those lazy liberals are sharpening their knives and finally polishing their silver tongues and are out for––can I say it? –––the kill!
As with so many other aspects of their approach to public life, Republicans provide incontrovertible evidence concerning their fealty to ideology above all else by applying the tag “immoral” to whatever they don’t like. Taxes? Immoral. Regulation? Immoral. Helping those less fortunate? Immoral. It’s especially funny (or galling, depending on which side of the bed you fell out of) to hear right-wing Christians wallow in this type of thinking. Isn’t helping the poor one of the biggest rules handed down by Jesus? How is that immoral? How is paying taxes immoral? Remember the give unto Caesar story?
They don’t really care that it doesn’t make sense or that it’s entirely inconsistent with their other arguments.
Whenever progressives point to the necessity of things like good education and health care for the poor and lower middle class citizens, rich Republicans like Paul Ryan jump up and demand that the poor not accept such assistance because of the damage to their moral fiber. Is this not a form of nanny state thinking? Ryan and his ilk are SO concerned with the moral well being of the poor that they are ready at the drop of a W2 to protect them from themselves. They may go unemployed for years due to Republican business schemes, may not be able to collect unemployment, may get only a pittance when they do work and may have health care taken away from them; they may end up dying of starvation and disease but when they do, their souls will be pure thanks to Paul Ryan protecting them from the moral ravages of Big Government.
How nice that they have Nanny Ryan looking out for their well being. If not in this world, then the next, to which he and his right-wing colleagues will be more than happy to guarantee expeditious transport.
But if one attempts to discuss the many billions in breaks and subsidies provided to corporations, the clarion call to the battlements sounds and CEOs stand shoulder to shoulder with their brave, tail wagging Republican employees to fend off such scurrilous attempts to save THEIR souls from moral destruction.
Hey, if corporations are people, as Willard the Rat maintains, then shouldn’t Republicans be equally concerned about the dangers of handouts from Big Government?
I guess that personhood thing only goes so far. Besides, those corporate souls are already black as hell anyway. No chance of any moral rescue mission. Might as well order another $500 bottle of wine at some ritzy Washington restaurant frequented by wealthy donors and corporate lobbyists and toast all those dead poor people.
Oh look, over at that other table, it's Willard and Ann. The poor lady, I hope she's brought her concealed Uzi in case there are any liberals waiting to murder her husband.
I'm sure she and Willard have been discussing their own plans for rescuing America's lower classes from the moral turpitude of a decent life.
Without spending more time on whether the lifeguard should have left his post, which is something I am sure is being discussed between the city and lifeguard company, the point of my original comment was that you should be careful using this kind of event to attack private services or you have no argument when the same reasoning is used to question whether liberals can make a train run on time. You have to look at the big picture and the history before laying blame.